#hardscrabble

BRUH Her face is killing me! 🤣

Morning coffee by the water

Thank you @@Moofox for commissioning me!

Adorkable Twilight & Friends - “Hardscrabble.”

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Heads up, murder below. Not particularly graphic or anything, but it’s there.

 The quiet grating of boots treading across pea gravel seemed to whisper profane secrets to the lone figure ghosting south. The silent specter paid no nevermind to the message in the static, their mind was on other things. Murder by lantern light, intimate proximity to a dying man yet living. Long strides over parched land, the moans of its thirst echoed in the wind sighing through the sagebrush. 

 The land didn’t care what liquid slaked its thirst and as such was no stranger to the hardscrabble life of those living on the edge. Of law, of life, of society. It was a hard place for hard people and as such it drew the malcontents of life to its bosom, nurturing them with blood and whiskey. Sometimes the blood and whiskey was mixed, a serpent suspended evermore in the amber liquid. A macabre drink for cynical people who drank to live all the while death was present in the very essence of what they drank.

 Cactus needles rattled and crunched under the heavy tread of a heedless foot, head tucked against the wind, ears deaf to death fast on his heels. Death was an old friend, a dance partner to every last sun bleached soul that made their livelihood under this cinema scope vault of sky. It dulled the anxiety that rode alongside you, tamed it into something more a vague recollection. When it grew too dull, that was when death had a habit of striking. Testing you, seeing if other things had grown dull with disuse. Reflexes clogged with the fine powder of pulverized sand, slowing you down, weighing you down. A coffins weight strapped across your back, an hourglass slowly filling up telling you buy the back breaking weight that your time was up. Borrowed time soon to be paid back with interest.

 Like this fool, Jack Dempsey. Hit a ceruleum convoy, spirited off the volatile substance to some unknown bolthole. Probably intended to turn a profit by selling it to a shady individual not wanting to pay into the coffers of  Amajina & Sons Mineral Concern. The russet figure clad in shades of sunset couldn’t say they blamed anyone thinking such thoughts. Bastards had once upon a moon sold to the Garleans so any bad luck that happened their way was just deserts. Still a convoy was hit, souls were fed to the thirsty land, the tithe of blood greedily accepted. A life for a life, the land cared not whose, innocence or guilt mattered not. The ceruleum would attract bombs eventually and that would impact the whole area more so than just a missing shipment.

 Lives were cheap and not the cause for the bounty. Just some volatile rock processed and used to make ships fly. Funny how a rock could make a ship fly, escape the bonds of the sea and take to the heavens. But without it would just come crashing back down the the earth it had forsook. Pure poetry that. Just like fate fast following the fugitive fleeing a fearsome finale, funny.

 A furious sound like a fumarole going off was a startling contrast to the soft sighing of plainsong dancing lightly over the midnight wasteland. F’nor had no compunction about shooting a man in the back. Life was hard and only fools made it harder than it needed to be. Honor? She didn’t need it, a restrictive construct that got people killed. She fully intended to not be one of the countless untallied  dead heaped into a dry gulch to feed the carrion birds and coyotes of Thanalan. No sun whitened bones as an empty testament to fate turned fickle and fae. No sir, not her.

 The grisly sound of heavy knife biting through flesh was just a common undertone to the melody of life here in the desert. Whistle of steel, grunt of exertion, sand sifting softly along the serpentine soil, grating of steel on bone. The pop and crunch of gristle crackling and a dark chuckle of grim satisfaction. Life was bought with death here, especially those hanging around the bottom rung. Fingers only just barely grasping the corroded iron of life.

 The young bounty hunter turned into the wind and tugged a dust rag over her face. Decapitated head grasped by lank greasy hair, she headed off silently to collect her pay. Someone else could do the hard work of finding where the ceruleum had been stashed. The price of a bottle of whiskey, sidewinder coiled in the potent liquor, a bullet and a night of watching a wanted man drink his way to the bottom of a bottle hadn’t been that steep for the pay. Not a bad way to land a big fish.